The Woman in the Window

by A.J. Finn

Watching is like nature photography: You don’t interfere with the wildlife.

As a doctor, I say that the sufferer seeks an environment she can control. Such is the clinical take. As a sufferer (and that is the word), I say that agoraphobia hasn’t ravaged my life so much as become it.

So much time. Nearly a year. I haven’t left the house in nearly a year.

I stare at the ceiling, feeling dead myself. Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene.

“My dear girl, you cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there.”

“The world is a beautiful place,” she insists, and she’s serious; her gaze is even, her voice level. Her eyes catch mine, hold them. “Don’t forget that.” She reclines, mashing her cigarette into the hollow of the bowl. “And don’t miss it.”

“I may do some good before I am dead.” —Jude, Part Sixth, Chapter 1.

So much I haven’t seen in so long. So much I haven’t felt, haven’t heard, haven’t smelled—the radiant warmth of human bodies, pop music from decades past, the punch of ground beans. The whole scene unreels in slow motion, in golden light. For a moment I shut my eyes, inhale, remember.

I remember moving through the world the way you move through air. I remember striding into this coffee shop, a winter coat wrapped tight around me or a sundress billowing at the knees; I remember brushing against people, smiling at them, talking to them.

boiling over the distant mountains. I rose to my knees, surveyed

But instead Norelli cuts him off. “It turns out your husband and your daughter are dead.”

You’ll notice I’m not asking what made you this way, she said to me. Or, rather, I said it to myself. Life made me this way.

“So what are you waiting for?” Nothing—not anymore. I’ve waited for my family to return; they won’t. I’ve waited for my depression to lift; it wouldn’t, not without my help. I’ve waited to rejoin the world. Now is the time.